It's not really a big mystery that cross-realm mailing has everything to do with all of the cross-realm technology installed in the game. So those who in their imaginations believe that this could have been done all along are very likely mistaken. And those who believe that they put it off for revenue reasons haven't come up with a decent rationale as to why they're doing this now. If it was so profitable and Blizzard was so greedy then it follows that they wouldn't bother with it at all.

Blizzard prioritizes their projects to suit themselves and there's a concept called critical chain where X and Y have to happen before you can do Z easily. This is likely part of that and while it may be news to some of you I don't think that cross-realm mailing of BOA's/Heirlooms is something that average players think about on a daily basis. Some do but I suspect that it's not a top-of-the-list concern for most others. Therefore it's not terribly surprising that Blizzard didn't drop everything to kowtow to that particular group of people.

It's like many other forum fallacies in which people believe that making a lot of noise about something is the same thing as demonstrating wide and broad-based support for the same thing. Not that common sense makes any difference at all to people who push their own agendas to the exclusion of everything else. It clearly doesn't. The nice thing about that though is that small groups of people pushing agendas are pretty easy to discount in the general scheme of things.

The most profitable thing: satisfied, repeat customers. I know having working x-realm mail will increase MY satisfaction. I have heirlooms, BoA armor tokens and acheology weapons piled up on the wrong servers from where I want them to be.

Or it could be the tech which allows them to say that these will be truly cross realm feature in WoD is already in place and that the upcoming WoD changes are more of a UI update to reflect the improved current tech. But, nah, let's go with the option that money hungry Blizzard have been sitting on a cash cow which they are only now reluctantly giving up for nebulous reasons at best.

I'm happy to see this. I'm glad to be able to mail them ahead of time if I choose to. The playerbase has been desiring this for years and when it's finally here, everyone wants to grab a pitchfork. Ridiculous. This community is disgustingly toxic.

Sadly, there will always be someone who will criticize EVERYTHING, including things done the right way. They'd bitch if they had to spend a night at the Playboy mansion, likely for not being able to log into a game they bitch about anyway.

If it wás a good source of income, why would they abandon that source of income. Nothing has changed there.

While I believe you are right about your claim that they did have the tech before... (or could have gotten it easily), I doubt it has anything to do with a source of income. Because they could still have that source of income if they did not do this.

Actually something significant has changed. Connected realms has made it possible for players to have more than 11 characters (22 to 50 depending on how many realms are connected to each other) who are connected in every way including mailing, heirlooms, gold, etc. This has made the idea of charging players money to do transfers untenable. You can't have one part of the subscriber base able to freely transfer items between more than 11 characters while charging the rest of the subscriber base for these same transfers because they aren't on connected realms.

Blizzard had to offer the ability to mail heirlooms. This still leaves other transferable items and gold which should also be available for transfer although the gold seller issue needs to be resolved with regard to that. The day of Blizzard charging for server transfers should be over soon.

Actually something significant has changed. Connected realms has made it possible for players to have more than 11 characters (22 to 50 depending on how many realms are connected to each other) who are connected in every way including mailing, heirlooms, gold, etc. This has made the idea of charging players money to do transfers untenable. You can't have one part of the subscriber base able to freely transfer items between more than 11 characters while charging the rest of the subscriber base for these same transfers because they aren't on connected realms.

Potentially true although I disagree with that last sentence. If you have toons scattered around on multiple servers there's no certainty or guarantee that the servers they are on will be connected to another server where you have your main or other alts. It's a bonus of course when it is but people that want to migrate their toons to a central place will mostly still be required to pay to transfer them to their realm, connected or otherwise. The whole one grand PVE realm thing may happen eventually but probably not any time in the foreseeable future.

How were they making money off of it? Last month I transferred to a new realm and realized I forgot an heirloom on my other realm. I sent in a ticket and they had to take time from helping people with actual problems to give me my heirloom back.

Allowing players to mail hierlooms by itself wouldn't be a very high priority feature in Blizzards view, but when larger projects such as blurring the lines between servers and bringing the entire Hierloom system to the account-wide level for an expansion launch create the opportunity to have it working as a side effect, they've decided to test an implementation early as a bonus.

Obviously the tech was, and is, available. The issue was the cost of implementation, which is undoubtedly more complicated than you suggest.

Is there really that many people transferring characters simply for heirlooms in the first place? I doubt it's a huge cash cow for Bliz.

Cost of implementation for that?. I would estimate a maximum of 10.000 euros, and I'm (very) generous here. The problem is how much would they have lost if they implemented that when the "account bound" thing was introduced. I'd say millions. Many of them. There was a thread on the EU forums for years, and they were occasionally saying the shit about "the tech"

You doubt that was a cash cow? Well, personally I transferred 3 times for exactly that purpose

Now that Blizzard is making the heirlooms truly xrealms, is it not odd, that suddenly they have the tech to do it In-Game, via the mail tool?

Honestly, I think they could have done it for a LONG time, but it just has been too good source of income to them.

"In the latest 5.4.2 PTR build, we are testing the new ability to mail account-bound items to other characters on your account that may be on different servers. Notably, this should allow you to move heirlooms between servers, in advance of our planned Warlords changes that will make them fully account-wide.

Sending this sort of mail should work like any cross-server communication: You send the item to "Playername-Servername" and it should otherwise work like regular mail. Note that you can only send account-bound items, and not other items or gold.

Example: I have a character, Thrall, on the Benedictus server. I want to send my heirloom mace to my alt, Durotan, on the Lycanthoth server. I'd log in as Thrall, and attach the mace to a mail addressed to "Durotan-Lycanthoth" and hit send."

While I don't doubt that they could have done it a long time ago, I wouldn't think that this timing has anything to do with it. It just seems like kind of a random time. Honestly I figured they would just wait for the new tab in WoD. So I'm not really sure why that was such a big announcement during the feature introduction of WoD.. if we're just getting it in a patch. (I'm glad for that.) But I don't understand why they didn't get this together sooner, and I'm glad they're hopefully doing it before the WoD prepatch even though I don't have any insane desire to level another character anytime soon.

I'm happy to see this. I'm glad to be able to mail them ahead of time if I choose to. The playerbase has been desiring this for years and when it's finally here, everyone wants to grab a pitchfork. Ridiculous. This community is disgustingly toxic.

You seriously haven't seem to realize that ever since mid-Wrath didn't you after the fall of the community didn't you? Whatever blizzard does, there must be that 1 person out there somewhere, hiding in his basement, starting rant threads about how X of the new things ruin WoW and doesn't do any good. And for clarification that person is not me :P. Honestly this is a long awaited feature since I no longer have to pay extra money for migrating a lvl 1 char to move heirlooms for me to level another alt on a different realm.